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Tumblr is losing $30M each year, CEO says
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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It's still around, and doing quite well at least from a community perspective. It's an underdog platform and the users want to keep it that way for the most part. The problem, though, is that the staff don't know how to monetize it properly. The thing they push the most is an ad-free subscriptions service which is already doomed to fail because everyone uses adblockers.
They had a good idea for monetization which was allowing users to buy advertising space for their own posts. The more you paid, the more users would see your post. Tumblr's own community ruined this by sending harassing comments and messages to the posts that were advertised with this feature.
Tumblr's biggest roadblock to monetization isn't their site structure or ideas, it's their community.
They also tried taking advantage of that by enabling pvp through ads. Like making you able to promote other people's posts or to give them a bazillion checkmarks
Yeah, I dunno what that guy is on about.
The multicolored infinite checkmarks and Blazing came out almost back to back and both were huge hits with the community.
The term "enabling PVP" was suggested by Tumblr users because of the aggressive attitude the community would have towards sponsored posts. As you can expect, nobody wants to spend money to be harassed, and terms like this turn people off spending money on the site.
I don't understand why Tumblr admins embrace the factors that make spending money on Tumblr bad, instead of culling the free users who attack paying users. It's not even like the remaining Tumblr users can revolt. They're hated by the rest of the internet, they don't have anywhere else to go and they don't have the tech know-how to set up their own site. Tumblr can't expect to maintain their "unique website culture" and make money at the same time.
You're not wrong. The community does certainly need to lighten the hell up and accept the fact that the company needs to make money somehow.
But I also can't really blame them, either. They see all these other social media sites choking themselves to death in desperate attempts to milk every last drop of money they can, and naturally they want none of that on Tumblr. Finding a balance between making money and not pissing off the community is important.
I don't blame the community for wanting to avoid enshittification. In an ideal world, everyone should.
But that's not what they're doing. They're not making any concrete protests to Tumblr's anti-privacy and anti-user changes. They refuse to search for and create Tumblr alternatives. They only cry (on Tumblr) about how Tumblr is the only site left for them, please don't add this feature my autism and depression can't handle it blah blah blah. They're actively sabotaging monetization strategies that are user-friendly. They are - as a low-tech demographic that would rather have a "free" service than a paid user-friendly one - the reason why Tumblr has to enshittify.
Used Tumblr for 11 years because Tumblr has my favorite microblogging format. No longer frequently. The user quality dropped massively after December 2018.
I'm genuinely curious, which monetization strategy would you use? Trophies?
The idea of a monthly service is not a bad one, but they need to offer something other than a thing everyone already uses for free. Tumblr already has other numerous one-time purchases that could be included in a monthly sub, like badges, Blaze, the crabs, etc. Getting one free Blaze per month with your sub, free crabs to give out, higher upload limits, stuff like that. A sub would need to leverage their existing features.